What’s the difference between “That’s it there!” and “There it is!” in terms of topic?
Looking for scissors:
There they are!On finding them. The topic is the scissors, or the present activity is looking for the scissors.
The scissors were on the mind previously, but now something else is happening.
That's them there!Something is seen whose relevance is not immediately apparent. Then it is realized that what is seen is something that was previously on the mind. The scissors is not the topic, but it1 previously was the topic.
What about a posse pursuing some bandits through open country on horses. The outlaws are some distance ahead of the posse and the posse occasionally loses sight of them, which is not good. They see them:
There they are!or
That's them there!I can’t see a reason to choose one or the other.
PS: Five months later
I need to retract this, or refine it.
The boss gave me his old laptop. Six months previously I had borrowed a laptop from my old school and had found four plastic bags which fit neatly inside each other and fit that laptop nicely. I was rummaging through a big cardboard box filled with plastic bags looking for that plastic bag to put the boss’s laptop in. I saw a brightly colored plastic bag. I realized that it was the bag I was looking for.
I said:
That's it there!That is, the second case, where I said the scissors (or the bag) is not the topic.
I was actively looking for it, so it is not correct to say, it was ‘on the mind previously, but now something else is happening.’ But it is correct to say, ‘Something is seen whose relevance is not immediately apparent.’
Perhaps?
On another occasion, when the thing I was looking for (a small plastic cover to a razor blade cartridge) was actually in my hand before I found it, I didn’t say anything at all.
On the relation between There it is! and
It IS there!
( Perhaps we can formalize real world relationships using grammatical relationships.)
On a different occasion, going down the hill from the school, I realized I didn’t have my hat. I understood I had either never put it on in the morning, leaving for school, or I had left it in the classroom.
I thought I had better go back to the classroom to check that it wasn’t there. Seeing it in the classroom, I said:
It IS there!I had reason to believe I might find it where I did find it.
The only difference between the 2 situations is my state of mind, and the search activity that that prompted?
What is the grammatical relationship between
There it is! and It IS there!
: The response described above: When what I was looking for it I found in my hand (It was a shaving cartridge holder), I didn’t say anything at all.
: I spent time looking for a magnifying glass. Its cover was on my desk. I gave up looking for it. Some time later, I opened a drawer and saw it there, where it was kept. I didn’t say, ‘That’s it there!’
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On plural subjects, singular verbs see SubjectVerbDisagreement↩︎